Blamed for work situation

[Loveofeclairs]

Name changed for this.

Something went wrong with work I had prepared before going on holiday. When I returned, my manager made a light-hearted comment along the lines of “you did a booboo”, which made it clear to me that the assumption was that I'd made a mistake.

I'm actually confident I did everything correctly. I checked it myself and it worked, but when my manager tried to access the files, there was an error which was eventually fixed by someone else. Nobody established what caused it.

I'm really quite upset and uncomfortable that the assumption I've been careless has been left hanging, especially when I don't believe I've done anything wrong. I asked if we could look into what happened so it doesn't happen again, but my manager seemed keen to move on now it's been resolved. He doesn’t seem bothered, but I’m worried this will affect my chances of promotion next year. Also, I really want to understand what went wrong so that it doesn’t happen again.

AIBU to insist that this is investigated further and make clear that I don't accept that I made the mistake? And how to go about it? I don’t want to come across as pushy or trying to shift blame as it seems everyone has moved on and there’s no lasting damage.

As long as you have something in writing from your manager to say there’s no need to investigate further, I would move on. Banging on about it is just drawing everyone’s attention to the error whether it was your fault or not.

I'd be more concerned that an IT cock up of undetermined cause would affect promotion prospects months in the future

Is there some kind of never forgotten blame culture where you work?

The assumption was that I didn’t save the work properly, so the implication was that I was distracted and careless which is not me at all and I don’t want this hanging over me.

Move on. It doesn't sound like anyone is blaming you or making a big thing out of it. Even if you had caused the issue, it's important to remember that everyone makes mistakes; it's just a part of being human. You seem like you can't accept that.

What was the error that was fixed by someone else? Was it a file extension issue?

The best way of not getting promoted next year is to make a big deal of this. Your manager doesn’t appear to care, there’s no formal action arising from it, and everyone is just moving on. In a month or so no-one will even remember it happened, I expect.

If you make a big fuss all that will happen is you’ll (a) make sure they definitely do remember the “boo boo” (b) paint yourself as disruptive and a pain, and (c) risk it being found that you did, in fact, boo boo.

Just let it drop.

Thank you for the replies. Reading them does put things into perspective and perhaps I overreacted.

It’s not a bad place to work generally, but it can be quite unforgiving when people make mistakes or are perceived as being bad at their job. There can be a lot of gossip and I can only imagine what the reaction was when they thought I had made a mistake. I think I’m just worried that if I get that reputation, even if it’s undeserved, it will affect my future here.